How to Spot ‘Toxic Femininity’
How to Spot ‘Toxic Femininity’
It’s past time to talk about toxic femininity.
The American upper-middle class has spent decades discussing “toxic masculinity” — a logical if aggravating response to the reality that the majority of human leaders, across most of time, have been business- or warrior-class males. During this same period, at least in post-feminist intellectual culture, the ladies have mostly gotten a break. But, today — 60 long years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the first affirmative action legislation, as movements such as “4B” and “Kill All Men (again)” trend online — it may be time for that to change.
Toxic femininity, it strikes this XY author, can take many forms — and looks rather different from the male equivalent. A default feminist reply, whenever anyone trots out language of the kind that I am using here, is that most of society’s “toxic” murderers, rapists, and brawlers are men: Males commit up to 79 percent of index/felony violent crime. Well, yes: Men are much bigger and stronger and more openly aggressive than women are — these aren’t the sort of evils where we’d expect to see the distaff sex well represented.
If we switch our lens of analysis to the sort of bad things we’d expect smaller, more clever people to engage in, especially when they hold full control over other beings, the picture changes. Of the 400,000-plus serious criminal child abuse incidents that were reported and prosecuted in the representative year of 2022, women were implicated in 213,876 cases versus under 200,000 cases for men. In 2013, the gap was even larger: 412,304 cases with a female perpetrator versus 312,333 cases with a male perp.
At the extreme end of the abuse spectrum, the United States has the highest annual rate of formally recognized infanticide in at least the developed world, at 8.0–8.1 cases per 100,000 young babies, the large majority of which involve a supervisory female parent. It might be argued that these trends exist because women interact more with children overall, but most serious child abusers are parents or other full-time residents of the same multi-person home — and the large majority of modern American women now work externally themselves rather than staying home all day with the kids.
Conservatives who see abortion as more than an individual health care choice might well add that roughly 1 million medically unnecessary D&Cs (abortions via dilation and curettage) take place annually, with up to 60,000 of these being late-term procedures falling at least into the second trimester. Almost none of these abortions, whatever your position on reproductive choice, are explained by factors such as rape or incest. The Guttmacher Institute put the percentages that were so motivated at 1 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively, in a 2004 study, and more recent research finds that the reasons for late-term procedures are “essentially the same” as those for other abortions. The most prevalent motivation cited by Guttmacher, paraphrasing slightly, was the desire to maintain the same financial and social lifestyle.
For that matter, many conservatives and “TERFS” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) might well define the abuse of the weak to include the remarkable number of “child gender transitions” currently going on in society. Per Reuters and my own independent research for the Genspect conference, close to 20,000 young minors have been subjected to a double mastectomy or the administration of powerful opposite-sex hormones during just the past few years. According to some studies, up to 3 percent of all young Americans now identify as transgender or “nonbinary,” and adult Western support for transgenderism is . . . not a male-driven movement.
Another area of socially damaging XX behavior, at least as defined by nearly all men and women ever to live, is misuse of the rather awesome Helen of Troy power of female sexuality. Examples of this have generally been thought to include: pregnancy fraud, paternity fraud, false allegations of sexual violence against men, infidelity, and certain kinds of self-exploitation that platforms such as OnlyFans enable. British OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue recently set a world record — closely contested by her friend and rival Lily Phillips — by having sex with 1,000 men in one day. Blue, per several recent interviews and her professional website, now plans to try for 2,000.
In addition to criticizing Blue herself, normal men should certainly criticize and mock the caddish young fellows who stood in a public line, masked, waiting for their 72 special seconds with their Juliet. The actress’s sizable fan base deserves reproach as well. Still, organizing, recording, and profiting from the large-scale distribution of “vice” material is not the same as sometimes consuming it. Hugh Hefner was responsible for what he did, and so are the hundreds of thousands of U.S.-based women producing pornographic material on OnlyFans.
The other social negatives mentioned above also seem to be on the rise. Although this is not American data, nearby Jamaica recently reported such a high level of paternity fraud (25 percent) that this made the front pages of several papers. For that matter, “regular” single motherhood, which is clearly both a female and a male problem, is also at epidemic levels: 36 percent for white Americans and a remarkable 69 percent for black Americans the last time this author looked.
Beyond the criminal and social offenses committed by members of the two sexes, it is also clear that, on average, women have group-specific vices that significantly affect performance at the leadership level, just as men do. While the great male weakness might be something along the lines of “stupid impulsive cruelty,” the great female weakness seems to be almost the reverse: a tendency toward extreme levels of misguided empathy.
One study found that a list of statements that most Finnish women believe includes: “Micro-aggressions are to be challenged often and actively,” “A white person can never understand how a Black person feels,” and “You should not say things that might offend an oppressed person.” Strikingly, and no doubt to the chagrin of my harder-edged TERF friends, roughly 66 percent of all women versus less than 25 percent of men fully agreed with the thesis “Trans women are women.” Beliefs of this kind – likely representative of white, female majorities in other countries — are real, reliable, and relevant when it comes to the ability of first-world societies to make coherent policy concerning crime, legal and illegal immigration, and even women’s sports.
One could go on for quite some time, providing examples of what I here label “toxic femininity.” Less than half-jokingly: After what I would now peg as four or five distinct “waves” of feminism, an increasing number of XX citizens seem to essentially believe that asking a citizen woman to do anything is abuse. A mob online recently came for popular dating coach Gia Macool, following her suggestion that — absent any fight or major disagreement — wives should regularly sleep with their husbands.
This was not a one-off result. A poll of my own found that fewer women than modern men (who also were hardly perfect) feel they have any responsibility to “emotionally, sexually, socially, and financially or domestically” satisfy a serious romantic partner. Perhaps as an illustration of this, a female online influencer recently went wildly viral on X, drawing thousands of approving comments from the sisterhood, after posting a video threatening to divorce her husband — a telephone high-wire man who brings in six figures annually — because he was sometimes sloppy with the chores.
The point of all this is not that “women are bad.” Men do still commit most of the serious felonies, start almost all of the wars, and so forth. Rather, it is that women are . . . people. As more XX citizens become leaders, it is becoming radically obvious that there are usually female-coded traits that we should watch for, just as there are weaknesses that are more common for boss-men. A “female future,” it now seems evident, would not look like utopia.
When it comes to picking leaders, of either sex, we should probably focus on the level occupied by that smallest and most persecuted of minorities — the individual.
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